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Around a halve year back I stumbled over Kaggle.com, a vital community portal of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning experts. Kaggle not only encourages people around the world to share thoughts and example data sets on popular machine learning tasks, they also host great AI challenges.

Since I joined the Kaggle community 6 month ago, I was fascinated about the individual challenges that were published. Those challenges range from predicting Mercari product prices over detecting icebergs from radar data to speech recognition tasks.

Many companies such as Google, Mercari or Zillow are hosting challenges where more than thousand of teams try to predict the best results. Often it is unbelievable how those teams solve these complex machine learning tasks.

Besides providing the challenges and the data sets necessary to wake the interest of global leaders within the machine learning and AI community, Kaggle also offers a tremendously powerful kernel execution environment. This execution environment consists of preconfigured Docker containers that were specifically designed for training models. In order to design and execute a machine learning kernel you simply edit the code online (Python, R, Notebook) and execute it within the Kaggle infrastructure.

As Kaggle docker containers are completely preconfigured you save a lot of time to download and prepare your environment.

Kaggle really pushes the AI community forward in terms of offering a flexible and open platform for executing kernels and to quickly get hands on interesting data sets. The community platform also does a pretty good job in bringing the global community together and stimulates a broader and practical discussion outside the theoretical scientific community.

Besides if you need a quick start tutorial on how to train your first neural network, grab my eBook at Amazon:

SLAC and Stanford university recently announced a breakthrough of using neural networks, one of the base algorithms of Artificial Intelligence, to spped up their data analysis effort. The spacetime data SLAC and Standford analysis is crucial for the understanding of the universe. By using neural networks to analyze those complex distortions in spacetime known as gravitational lenses the Stanford researchers were able to analyze the data 10 million times faster than traditional methods.
The researchers fed a neural network with half a million of images of gravitational lenses, which typically takes a day. Once the training process is finished, the trained AI neural network is capable of detecting similar lenses within a fraction of a second. The precision of the newly introduced Artificial Intelligence based methodology is comparable to the traditional approach that took weeks to finish.
This is another application domain where Artificial Intelligence helps to speed up traditional analysis methods from taking month to less than a second. We can expect that the analysis of spacetime anomalies will gain a lot of traction, now that the analysis process does not take years. Refer to the original press release here.
If you are interested into how artificial neural networks are implemented, read my Kindle eBook on ‘Applied Artificial Intelligence’.

Since the first commercial appearance of e-Ink Displays around the year 2008, a large collection of cheap e-book readers, such as the Sony PRS505 or Amazon’s Kindle, were successfully introduced on the consumer market. As the e-Ink technology became mature in this field of application, millions of e-book readers are in active use today and the amount of sold e-books is nearly the same level as of traditional books.

E-Ink technology was first mentioned in 1997 based on research started at the MIT Media Lab. Joseph Jacobson and Barrett Comiskey are listed as inventors on the original patent filed in 1996.
E-Ink displays offer some great advantages over alternative display technology, such as extremely low power usage, incredible high contrast and the ability to preserve the static image for an unlimited amount of time without the use of any energy at all. E-Ink displays on the other hand do not offer much multimedia capabilities as they are mostly operating on grayscale, or very simple single color modes. Also their slow reaction times prevent e-Ink displays to show any videos.

Beside the widespread use of e-Ink displays in e-Ink ebook (or even as prototypical Smartphone display) reading devices, their use within industrial applications and rough production or outdoor scenarios is still underestimated. As e-Ink displays offer perfect contrast and preserve the displayed image over an unlimited amount of time, these displays could be the perfect choice for machine interfaces.
Following examples show the use of e-Ink displays in various interesting applications, such as static information on pillboxes, showing information directly on a mountain bike or even to directly show information on a snowboard.

Ready Player One, a science fiction novel written by Ernest Cline, is set in the year 2044 after a global energy breakdown and economic recession. As resources are rare these days, the remaining people live under poor conditions in crowded megacities, where they spend their time working and living in a virtual world called OASIS. OASIS is a massive multiplayer online simulation game created by computer game programmer genius James Halliday and his close friend Ogden Morrow. Halliday, with no heirs or other living family, dies suddenly and leaves a treasure hunt video will that promises the ownership of OASIS and his company to those who can solve puzzles hidden in OASIS. Three keys (Copper, Jade, and Crystal) are hidden throughout the universe of OASIS and pass through the matching gates will receive his fortune and controlling the virtual OASIS universe. As Halliday grew up during the 1980s pop culture, the treasure hunt is a funny retro story about the rise of arcade and computer game during the 80s.

Those of you who grew up during the late 1980s, playing arcade games and owning an Amiga or C64 computer, will definitely love this book as i did!

Did you ever wondered what the Big Data Hype means to us in reality? Information and communication technology, advanced network bandwidth and intelligent data analysis and prognosis enable fantastic insights into our modern society. No matter if you are collecting data within urban areas, such as the different ways Pizza delivery is taking in Manhattan on a Friday afternoon or analyzing the crop in large agricultural facilities. Within the book The Human Face of Big Data, the authors Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt present the human and society dimension of this new hype on analysing and prognosis of all kind of information.

The Human Face of Big Data captures, in glorious photographs and moving essays, an extraordinary revolution sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, healthcare, and everyday life. It’s already enabling us to provide a healthier life for our children. To provide our seniors with independence while keeping them safe. To help us conserve precious resources like water and energy. To alert us to tiny changes in our health, weeks or years before we develop a life-threatening illness. To peer into our own individual genetic makeup. To create new forms of life. And soon, as many predict, to re-engineer our own species. And we’ve barely scratched the surface . . .

The Chinese company Onyx, which is mainly known by their Onyx-Boox ebook readers, announced these days to publish an Android smartphone that integrates an e-Ink touch display. To use e-Ink displays has several advantages as well as some major negative aspects too. As many e-Ink based ebook readers already proved, e-Ink displays offer great readability in direct sunlight. The perfect contrast of e-Ink displays is not comparable with traditional displays. Also the fact that e-Ink displays can show and persist scenes over days without using energy is a really cool feature that helps to run the Onyx smartphone for at least a week without reloading. Negative aspects of e-Ink displays are the low update frequencies and very reduced color capabilities at best, which makes it hard or even impossible to use e-Inks for multimedia applications. This Onyx phone is definitely not the best choice for multimedia evangelists but it could prove a valuable design for outdoor purposes, passionate e-book readers, travelers or elderly people with debility of sight.

Txtr, one of the leading European ebook marketplaces, recently announced txtrbeagle a low end external eInk reading device. By offering no cable connection, no WLAN and only Bluetooth to connect to a specific Smartphone-App that converts and transmits books in raw image format, the txtrbeagle dispenses a powerful CPU as well as power consumpting multimedia features. This low energy strategy allows extremly long periods of operation with just two AAA batteries and a price around 10 Euro. txtrbeagle offers a resolution of 800×600 and an internal 4GB storage, which is enough for storing 5 books in raw image format. According to it’s extreme low price as well as it’s easy connectability to smartphones, several companies already announced ideas to use txtrbeagle as external eInk display for various application scenarios.

Ender’s Game, written by Orson Scott Card in 1985, for me belongs to the top 10 in modern science-fiction stories, due to a fantastic story that deals with computer games and human intelligence. The book, which is based on a initial short story, won several awards, such as the Hugo and the Nebula awards.

Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggin, the novel’s protagonist, lives with his kind parents and his sadistic elder brother Peter, until the government recruits him to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training. Since the human world barely survived two conflicts with the Formics, an insectoid alien species, which are called Buggers by most of the people, the government proactively recruits and trains children in an orbiting Battle School. The children are trained to fight against each other in strategic battles, where each battle group tries to score against other groups. Soon it becomes clear that, in spite of his youth, Ender is one outstanding strategic player that never looses a battle. It seems as if Ender could be a natural born player who could save the earth if the next wave of predominant alien Buggers appears to overrun mankind…

Daniel Suarez became one of my favourite tech authors within the last years. Daniel Suarez, who was born on 21. Dezember 1964, is a US software developer, system consultant and primarily an amazingly cool science-fiction author. He started to write under an anonym Leinad Zeraus, before he wrote his three best selling thrillers Deamon in 2006, Freedom (TM) in 2010 and his newest title Kill Decision in 2012. You can find more about Daniel Suarez on his webpage.

Deamon

Deamon, written by Daniel Suarez in 2006, is one of the best and most thrilling tech and science-fiction novels i have read within several years. The story begins with some misterious kills which are all somehow connected to the natural death of the great cyber game designer Matthew Sobol. Sobol, the genius owner and creator of one of the most successful, interconnected computer games, definitely had a plan for the world after he passes away. So it is detective Peter Sebeck who has to find all the parts of this genius puzzle to rescue the world from Matthew Sobol’s demonic plan.

Freedom (TM)

Within the second part of his amazing debut title ‘Demon’, Daniel Suarez thrills his readers with continuing the story of an unstoppable computer virus that starts to blackmail banks and whole industries. This virus is the beginning of a public revolution against copyright industry, corrupt financial industries and even against police and governments. This story tells a tale about an artificial intelligence supported public revolution that frees our minds from trademarks, copyright and corrupt capitalism. All in all a really great finish for Daniel Suarez’s Deamon thriller.

Kill Decision

Kill Decision is Daniel Suarez recent book, which deals with drone war and swarm intelligence. It tells us a story on anonymous wars where swarms of machines pull the trigger against humans. Linda McKinney is a myrmecologist, a scientist who studies the social structure of ants. Her research results are stolen by an unknown force that tries to overrun the american homeland with a drone army. Together with Odin, a secretive Special Ops soldier who has detailed inside knowledge on this faceless enemy, McKinney has to arouse the world before it is too late to stop this machine intelligence.